Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife--Jesse Mercer's Cluster of Spiritual Songs (1810): A Study in American Hymnody. .

Marini, Stephen A.

Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife--Jesse Mercer's Cluster of Spiritual Songs (1810): A Study in American Hymnody. By Kay Norton. (Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music, 34.) Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 2002. [xxiii, 202 p. ISBN 0899-90109-3. $47.50.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, indexes.

Jesse Mercer's hymnal The Cluster of Spiritual Songs was the most important hymn collection in the lower South from 1800 to 1835. Through its longevity--it passed through eleven editions--and its combination of classic English Evangelical hymns with rough-hewn American spiritual ballads and revival songs, Mercer's Cluster became a classic of southern hymnody in the early republic. In Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife, Kay Norton offers an important new interpretation of this historic hymnal. While retaining standard hymnological inquiries into biographical, bibliographical, and literary matters, Norton sets those interests in a much wider context that also includes race, class, gender, religious and regional history, and musical resources. By her construction and pursuit of this ambitious agenda, Norton provides a reading that significantly advances the study of this complex religious, musical, and cultural text.

Mercer (1769-1841), a nationally known Baptist elder from Powelton, Georgia, published the first edition of The Cluster around 1800 as a collection of roughly 150 hymns and added a small supplement to the 1804 edition. No copies of these first two editions have survived. Mercer appended another supplement in 1810, bringing the total number of hymns in the third edition to 199. The hymnal's success encouraged Mercer to expand it, but the next edition in 1823 emerged as a fundamentally different work, containing 664 hymn texts with an additional section of 13 "miscellaneous poems" and an appendix of 14 more hymns. This enlarged 1823 edition has been reprinted and interpreted in C. Ray Brewster's The Cluster of Jesse Mercer (Macon, Ga.: Renaissance Press, 1983), the only previous book-length study of the hymnal.

Norton argues that the 1810 edition deserves special attention because it is the definitive source for the earliest stratum of Evangelical hymnody in the lower South and it served as textual "midwife" for later southern singing school tune books such as William Walker's Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (New Haven, Cono.: Nathan Whiting, 1835) and B. F. White and E. J. King's The Sacred Harp (Philadelphia: the authors, 1844). Her book presents these two dimensions sequentially, focusing first on how Mercer's religious, social, and cultural contexts shaped his Baptist hymnodic "offspring," then turning to the texts of the 1810 edition and providing a tune repertory for them from eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century singing school tune books.

Norton initially places Mercer's work in its Baptist hymnological Context as heir to a half dozen regional hymnals printed in New England, the middle states, and the upper South before 1810. Her primary effort, however, is to seek new meanings for the collection by exploring dimensions of race, gender, and class in Mercer's career and his Georgia environment. Her cultural interpretation of The Cluster rests on the claim that Mercer's moderate Calvinist theology of "free grace" was the source of heightened sensitivities to the plight of marginalized people in his society--slaves, women, and Native Americans--that his hymnal articulated. This sanguine case, however, rests on slim evidence and much inference, and Norton's effort to extend Mercer's "free grace" theology into the spiritual dictum for what we would now call an inclusive hymnal runs afoul of both doctrinal and hymnodic examination.

"Free grace" was not the likely source of Mercer's alleged social attitudes. The doctrine refers to the freedom with which God gives salvation to sinful humans as an unmerited gift. All Evangelicals affirmed free grace, but they drew different theological inferences from it. Norton has unfortunately confused "free grace" as understood by Calvinists such as Mercer, who taught that God used his freedom to choose in advance all who would be saved, for the Arminian version affirmed by John Wesley's Methodists, who claimed that God's freely given gift also entails human freedom to accept or reject it. Several times Norton states that Mercer and his fellow Separate Baptists were Arminian, but they plainly were not, and would be horrified by the charge that they resembled their Methodist archrivals on such an important doctrinal matter. The theological ground for Mercer's inclusivism lay elsewhere, in the egalitarian ecclesiology that all Evangelicals shared. Anyone who exhibited the requisite signs of saving grace, they taught, should be "gathered" into their churches regardless of their earthly status. Accordingly, Mercer preached and ministered to African Americans, women, and Native Americans as well as whites. On Norton's own account, however, he also seems to have held patriarchal and paternalistic views of these marginalized groups not atypical of his time, place, and religious community.

Other problems arise from the evidence Norton finds in The Cluster itself. After substantial discussions of the three groups in Mercer's life and milieu, Norton cites hymns from the collection that she sees as indicative of the compiler's moderate attitudes. She reports, for example, that The Cluster shared seventeen hymns with Richard Allen's Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Philadelphia: T. L. Plowman, 1801), the first African American hymnal; that female metaphors for the church abound in Mercer's collection and that hymns by four women appeared in the 1823 edition although not before; and that Mercer included AWAKED BY SINAT's AWFUL SOUND, a 1774 hymn written by Connecticut Mohegan Samson Occum, in the 1810 edition but removed it in 1823. The difficulty with this evidence is that it is entirely circumstantial. Norton offers no demonstration that Mercer included these specific hymns because they were written by or associated with African Americans, women, Native Americans, or their social and cultu ral circumstances. Without such evidence, her attempt to link their inclusion to Mercer's "free grace" theology and inclusive social attitudes cannot be sustained.

What then does account for Mercer's editorial policy? The best answer remains that of Brewster, who in 1983 had already begun to consider class, gender, and race issues surrounding the collection but concluded that Mercer's uppermost criteria for hymn selection were "Baptist convictions, a high commitment to foreign and home missions, the Evangelical experience of the Lordship and sweetness of Christ, and a moderate Calvinistic theology" (pp. 23-24). The 1810 Cluster contained a core of English Evangelical hymns that had already begun to cross denominational lines, and through Mercer's efforts they would eventually become canonical for all southern Evangelicals in the lower South. The preponderant majority of those hymns, including those cited by Norton as evidence for Mercer's moderate inclusivity, addressed aspects of the Christian life and experience, especially salvation, prayer, sanctification, and perseverance. The American hymns Mercer collected, including his own, voiced the same theological themes. T here is plenty of evidence from Mercer's career and writings that would further illuminate his understanding of such texts, but Norton has not taken the opportunity to address this central religious dimension of The Cluster.

Norton's review of The Cluster's hymn texts is far more accomplished. She helpfully divides the texts between "vestiges of the Great Awakening" from eighteenth-century English hymnody and the spirituals and camp meeting songs gathered by Mercer from American sources. She carefully traces the former to their origins in hymnals of the English Evangelical Revival and the latter to Baptist hymnals from New England, the middle states, and the upper South, as well as such popular early American sacred songsters as John Adam Granade's The Pilgrim's Songster (Lexington, Ky.: n.p., 1804). This thorough textual analysis is accompanied by extensive tables listing Mercer's hymns individually by their source.

Still more ambitious is Norton's tune repertory for the 1810 edition. Mercer himself suggested a few tunes for use with the 1823 edition, but even after retrodicting those to 1810, Norton faced a massive task in trying to supply an appropriate tune for each of the 199 texts. Using Nicholas Temperley's Hymn Tune Index Database (hymntune.music.uiuc.edu, accessed 20 February 2003) and the unpublished Dictionary of American Hymnology Database at Oberlin College, Norton matched Mercer's texts to a series of English and American tunebooks from Thomas Butts's Harmonia Sacra (London: the compiler, 1754) to William Hauser's Olive Leaf (Wadley, Ga.: Hauser and Turner, 1878). Where no match occurred, she has suggested appropriate tunes from the same sources.

The resulting tune repertory rests uneasily between a historical reconstruction of Mercer's musical environment in 1810 and a historical projection of his texts into the entire American singing school tradition and its English antecedents. Norton tells us that she made a conscious decision to choose the latter course because it is impossible to know what tunes Mercer knew and unlikely that he and his community knew very many. These caveats are certainly warranted and her tune repertory clearly demonstrates The Cluster's "midwifery" of the southern tunebook tradition. But Norton's musical choice here parallels the design of her cultural interpretations in the earlier sections of her book, and it may be questioned in the same way. Why not try to reconstruct the musical world of southern Evangelicals that the hymnal actually adumbrates instead of creating a tune repertory, however attractive, that is anachronistic to the text it sets?

Rather than grapple fundamentally with the complex religious culture and unfamiliar musical environment of the lower South from 1810 to 1823, as her title suggests, Kay Norton has created a study that uses The Cluster's third edition primarily as the site for a series of important postmodern inquiries. That Norton has applied such an agenda to Mercer's text is an important and salutary development in hymnological studies because it aligns the field more closely with contemporary historical and literary methods. The fact that the results are often impressionistic and counterfactual rather than constrained by direct documentary evidence should therefore not surprise us.